Another perspective is that we idolize many prominent/famous people and when they have a normal range of emotions (fear, anger, disgust, resentment, frustration, etc.), or just having a bad day, we judge them for it.

Also, though our culture prizes it highly I think "being famous" is probably in many ways very weird and bad and seems to drive many people insane. I don't think I could handle it and would not wish it on an enemy.

The asymmetry of familiarity must be weird too.

I've never publicly said this before, but I had this experience with Donald Knuth - I emailed asking him for copyright permission for something on Wikipedia, and he gave it (public domain), but he was extremely nasty about it because I had to reply asking for clarification and apparently receiving an email was extremely disruptive to him.

I try not to talk to public figures, most of them are only nice when in the context of what they are trying to sell. The rare exceptions deserve the praise they get.

I don't even know why I'm writing this......... it was years ago.

Knuth's distaste for email is well known: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

That doesn't excuse being nasty to somebody, though.